


Against the Dying of the Light

by Othalla



Category: PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gun Violence, Loss of Identity, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 16:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13127232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Othalla/pseuds/Othalla
Summary: Erangel is where you're born.(It's where you die, too.)





	Against the Dying of the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merriman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> This was a fun fic to write, and I do hope you like it!  
> And many thanks to [saiditallbefore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/pseuds/saiditallbefore) who checked it over for me :)

_Do not go gentle_ , they said.

-

They strap you down in your seat, and then they leave. The doors close. You hear a latch on the outside settle in place with a cold clang of metal against metal. Then the plane’s engines come to life, accelerating down the runway, and the plane takes off.

It’s a flying prison.

Between the cockpit and the rest of the plane is a thick, armored door with no visible lock to pick. Only two pilots boarded. If you could get through that door, you could take them, you think, but you have nothing but the threadbare clothes on your back and the teeth in your mouth. You can’t even get out of your seat.

You don’t have to look around to know that everyone else is just like you: scared shitless and unable to do anything about it.

People fear what they don’t know. And no one’s ever heard about Erangel.

-

(That’s a lie.)

-

The voice comes out of the speakers: _It’s time._

Your mind returns to the day before, when they’d taken you away, and then the hour just before they strapped you down, and they’d delivered their sentencing. You think: _I’m going to die_.

You really don’t want to die.

The breathing in the room stops, and the sound of the buckles unlatching bounces against your eardrums like steel. Your hands are sweaty. Reflexively you wipe them on your thighs.

It’s time.

-

You look at the people around you.

Then you jump.

-

That moment before you jump lasts a lifetime. Like in the movies that used to run on screen, when time pauses because someone’s on the verge of dying and the world stops for them. The engine decelerates, and the island below doesn’t come any closer.

They promise each other that they’ll get home. No matter what, they’ll get home.

A hundred people in a plane. There’s a certain power in a collective thought shared by all of them.

A certain helplessness, too.

-

The island coming closer is not unlike a punch to the face; suddenly, it breaks your nose. Your parachute gets caught in the branches of an old pine tree. The lines hold, and you don’t manage to release the straps from yourself before you swing like a pendulum into it and eat bark. You bite back a sound of pain. Bringing your hands up to your face, you gently tries to touch your nose and feel how bad it is. With a wince, you draw your hands away fast.

It’s bad.

You’re bleeding sluggishly, which isn’t good. And you’re hungry. It’s been a day now without food, and it’s not like you were eating well before that. You need to stop the bleeding before it kills you.

Passing out now would be like eating a gun, and you’re not ready for that yet.

You look down. Thankfully, the ground is only a meter or so below you. You’re mostly upright, too, hanging in your parachute as you are, so when you get the strap around your chest off you fall down the right way, with your feet first, and you even manage to land well enough. Your knees bend with the fall. You stay crouched on the ground and look around.

You tried to aim for no man’s land, a forest far away from where most people were landing, and you succeeded. There’s no one here, as far as you can tell.

On the bad side, that means there aren’t any houses to raid, either. Which means you’ll probably start out behind everyone, easy picking should anyone see you before you see them.

You take off running, sticking to the inside of the grove,

On the bright side, you spotted a shed during your descent. It should be just on the other side of the trees.

From what you could tell from their briefing, no structure is empty.

It’s less fun that way, apparently.

-

There used to be a lock on the door, but someone broke it at one point or another.

Clearly, you’re not the first to have gotten this idea.

Absently, you wonder how well it worked out for them.

-

(Absently, you wonder how it’ll work out for you.)

-

You almost cry when the shed isn’t empty.

You tear open the med pack to find cotton to stuff in your nostrils and some painkillers.

Then, you reach down and pick up the firearm and ammunition and load it.

Then, you arm it.

-

Then, you keep running.

-

Off in the distance, song is created through gunfire and screaming.

It’s steadily getting closer.

-

The wristband vibrates.

 _Shit_.

You’d forgotten about that completely. You look down at the screen, a stone in your belly, and swear at what you see.

You’re not in the zone.

-

Somehow you find a car.

It’s a shitty car, with a blown windshield and smooth tires. But there’s a key in the lock and when you turn it the car starts with a giant roar, and it’s a fucking godsend as your wristband vibrates in closer intervals.

Everyone will know where you are now, there’s no stopping that. The car can be heard from miles away.

You push your foot against the floor, heading east.

Heading toward the inner circle.

-

For a long while, nothing happens. Then, you pass a cluster of buildings, and someone starts shooting.

A bullet hits the passenger door. The shooter must be hiding in the high grass of the field, and instinctively you turn the car around, heading straight for it. You bend your head, trying to hide as much of yourself as possible while still being able to see where you’re going. Something red moves, and you narrow in on it.

There’s a person wearing a red shirt right in front of you, crouching in the grass. They have an automatic something or another perched against their shoulder. It looks dark and menacing. Your ears are beeping. You don’t know if the person with the red shirt is still firing on you or not, but you don’t care. You can’t care.

You’re getting closer, and you can see their eyes widen in fear, the white of them almost blinding.

You close your eyes just before you run them over.

The car jerks violently.

-

You don’t consciously decide to stop, but your foot falls off the pedal and won’t get back on.

You bend over and retch on the passenger seat. The bile hurts as it comes up your throat. Your stomach is empty, and it’s cramping from being forced to exile nothing but acid. You cough, wishing you had some water.

You have no water.

You spit as much of the taste out of your mouth as you can.

Then you open the door and get out.

-

If someone else had been around, you think they’d have acted by now. The inner circle is just a stone throw away and the wristband says you’ve got a little time left to cross it. It’s marginally safe. Probably.

You can’t just leave behind a person’s worth of resources.

-

The person with the red shirt had a helmet on their head.

Now you do.

-

You don’t go back to the car.

-

You take one shock, just enough to hurt you a little, before you’re safe inside the circle’s edges.

You collapse against the side of a boulder, facing the outside, and cry.

Your gun is armed.

You have it ready.

-

The wristband vibrates.

-

You’re in an apartment building and you’re not alone.

You’re hiding in a bathroom. The tiles have fallen on the floor, and the few still left on the walls are cracked and greasy. The dirtiness of this place is old and uncleanable. There’s nothing to be done about it; you can’t scrub this kind of dirt away. It has life of its own. It’s parasitic.

The floor creaks in the hallway. It did that for you, too, when you walked on it a minute ago, so you think you know where they are.

Arms shaking just a little, you point your gun. You take a breath. You steady your arms.

From the tiny sliver of space you left the door open with, you see them. You shoot. You hope it’s enough to get him, this first shot you’ve fired, but then they fire back and you shoot again, aiming blindly. Somehow it seems you hit something.

They don’t shoot back again.

-

This time, you don’t puke. Instead, you keep moving.

You go deeper into the apartment and find shoes to the side of a little girl’s bed. The sheets are yellow with small white clouds in a cross pattern, and by the sunken pillow a faded pink bear lies. The heart of the bear is on the outside and startlingly red. The shoes are brown. Functional, but not pretty, thick leather lacing up to wrap around your ankle. They’re a little small, but that doesn’t matter. They’re your shoes. You were born to run in them.

-

You run in them.

-

The circles are closing in on the big city to the west.

That’s bad, because that means you probably can’t get out of entering it.

-

Somehow, you don’t notice that someone is sneaking up on you until you have a bullet in your side.

You lunge to the side, trying to hide behind a wall. It’s thankfully high enough to hide you crouching, and concrete, so for a cover you could do worse. Only not really, as it’s standing too far away from anything else, and you can’t look both to the left and to the right at the same time. Whoever shot you could approach from either angle.

You’re bleeding through your shirt. The grey fabric is turning red and wet.

You don’t have time to take out the bandages from your backpack.

Adrenaline pumping, you make a bad decision. You stand up.

The one who shot you clearly hadn’t anticipated it, however, so it works in your favor. They’re on the other side of the wall, just within reaching range, and you grapple hold of their shoulders and try to wrench the rifle they’re holding away. It somewhat works. The rifle falls to the ground, but so does your gun.

Your eyes meet. They have blue eyes, almost like glacier ice. They’re terrified. They’re shaken.

You take that as the advantage it is, and punch them in the face. Something cracks.

Now there’s two people with a broken nose by this wall, but you’ve gotten used to the pain at this point and get ahold of your gun before they’ve even begun reaching for theirs.

You put the barrel of it between their eyes and fire.

-

Boom, headshot.

-

Blood splatters inside your mouth. Other things splatter there, too, but you want to think about that even less.

-

You don’t puke this time, either.

-

Inside the city is a free-for-all. You head for the remains of a convenience store, figuring you might as well try and find anything to eat while dealing with it.

-

You’re so goddamn hungry.

-

Someone goes to enter through the big windows at the front and they’re dead before they even hit the floor.

You lower the gun against your thigh, blowing a bubble after chewing. The bubble gets really big for cheap convenience store gum, and you’re sort of proud about that, never having been much good at bubble gum blowing when you were younger.

The barrel is burningly hot through the fabric of your pants. Maybe it’ll even leave a mark.

-

There’s a gun in your hand, and you think you were born holding it. It’s a solid weight, but one you don’t quite feel that you’re carrying. Your forearm weighs around a kilogram, one-point five percent of the total body weight, but until the moment you lose it, you don’t really know it’s there. It’s just your arm, doing things that arms do. The gun is the same. Maybe the hard edges of the handle have carved grooves into your palm, like rivers, and your forefinger won’t uncurl, but what does that matter? It’s your gun. It was meant for you and you were meant for this. Like stars were meant for burning, you were meant for this. This is why you were born; burning on Erangel.

You’re the gun, and the gun is you.

Always going off at the handle.

-

You kill another person and, suddenly, there’s only ten of you.

-

You don’t know how long you’ve been here.

You don’t know that you care.

Your side is burning.

-

Erangel is the sort of place where a person inevitably loses their sense of self. It’s something with the air, more than the dinner left on the stove in a square three-bedroom house or the many automatic firearms laying sprinkled on the floor like confetti on graduation day. It’s stale. Artificial. Air made in a lab that leaves you woozy and trigger happy, mouth tasting like iron and peppermint.

People forget their names, in Erangel.

They forget other people had names, too.

Sometimes (most times) it doesn’t even feel like the island exists. It’s just empty space.  People are just empty spaces. But then sometimes they’re crickets in a dragon tank, but the tank has no walls and the dragon doesn’t have teeth but if flies and screams and eats itself to the whispers of the noose tightening up.

It’s a dream land; the nightmare land.

The island you walk backwards into while facing Mother Russia.

-

(It’s a lie because they’ve all heard the stories. People don’t just go missing without other people knowing. Maybe they didn’t know the name, maybe they didn’t know the why, and maybe they didn’t even have a clue as to the how, but they sure as fuck knew the who.

Poor people have always known the who.

It’s not that hard.)

-

You’ve almost made it, there’s three of you left.

-

God Bless Mother Russia.

-

 _Rage_ , they said.

-

You do.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and first+last lines are from _Do not go gentle into that good night_ by Dylan Thomas.


End file.
